After he was caught stealing his final exam, struggling freshman burnout John Clawe finds himself forced into conducting industrial sabotage to equalize a scientific rivalry between his instructor and a renegade alchemist known as Tempestirae.When Clawe infiltrates Tempestirae's compound in the Highlands, he finds that salvaging his exam grade depends on preventing a civil war, halting the depletion of the lumeniferous aether (the medium through which light is transmitted), and confronting natural phenomenon that were lost when the ancient religions and the arts that kept the knowledge alive were forgotten to the ages. Yet, in accomplishing his assignment, Clawe risks disrupting the national economy and a more profound international catastrophe.
